Im am looking to understand a confirm information that a colleague has provided. Bottom line, our company uses AutoCad and recently purchased Solidworks 2015, which is locally hosted. We are undertaking a huge local server to cloud migration and need to have both AutoCad and Solidworks hosted in the cloud with the ability of those files to be opened/modified/saved to and from the cloud workspace. Our current local solution has been challenging because the network is often slow or unresponsive. Any further information you can provide, observations, challenges, expectations, and/or recommendations as to the best way to accomplish/proceed with the end result (above) would be graciously accepted. Here is the info I have received from our current IT support, who is a proponent of him continuing to host SW and ACAD locally:

"I spoke to my contact at MLC today and we conferenced in the account Rep that onboarded you guys. I was informed that there is no cloud app solution for Solidworks or PDM in the cloud at the moment. This would not be an option for us. I was informed by the account rep Loni who onboarded you and he stated there was a product out there but it is a framework for conceptual design and would not meet any of the requirements needed to build actuators. We do however have that option to move your physical Solidworks server into the cloud. We can build Virtual Machines and host them in the cloud ..that is one option and the cost (ballpark) would be somewhere between 500 to 1100.00 per month depending on the datacenter we use and the hardware specs. We can also go the datacenter route with physical hardware and the cost would be close to and or above the cost of a virtual environment. Essentially renting space for our physical server. We would have to do a multitenant setup for that and may need to provide a server that meets their requirements to do so as well to be accommodated into a server cabinet. I can get a quote together on that if you’d like. Since we have the Disaster Recovery server onsite, I do think we should stay the course on the Solidworks since we have the backups already in place and can spin up that system from the backups if we ever go down. That provides us some redundancy in addition to the backups already being uploaded to the cloud backup. Let me know your thoughts. "

We are using a company called EPIGRID which hosts our PDM infrastructure in the cloud but also administers our PDM. This was a great option for us because we have 2 locations that do not get very good internet speed. Our latency is a little over there minimum requirement and we deal with large vehicle designs. They also offer cloud workstations which offload processing power off of local computers and utilizes there workstations to do the work. This helps when you are using large assemblies or running FEA, and can be done using any type of pc, mac or chromebook. Our case was a unique situation (or so I thought) where they were able to hit all of our requirements.

When you say "Cloud" are you looking for a remote hosing company or are you looking for an existing PDM option that someone else hosts? We use the "Cloud" to host several of our servers. To us that means we have Virtual Servers that are hosted by companies like Rack Space and Amazon Web Services that are set up for us. These companies have huge server farms that they maintain and then just sell people resources. You tell them what type of server you need and how much hard drive space and for a monthly fee you have access. With that being said we run our PDM PRO server and our SW License server on a virtual machine hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS). There is a VPN connection between our office and the AWS network. This allows us to work in the office and access the PRM Pro server just like it was in our own building.